Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email, Like Cool People Do

Search This Blog

Pages

Top 10 Underrated Books (According to Moi)

There is a difficulty with this particular Top Ten Tuesday, which is that I tend to love books everyone else loves. This is a continual source of frustration for me, as I am a unique and delicate snowflake that cannot be like everyone else, and yet I keep being presented with evidence to the contrary. So excuse me while I scour the depths of my 'read' section on Goodreads...

1. The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance - Of course. I'm still WAY into this book months after having read it. My mom was in the hospital a month or so back, and when she came home, she'd lay in bed and I would read her chapters from this to keep her entertained. It's hilarious and insightful and well-meaning and I super-love it.

2. Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins - Emma Donoghue! They're like short stories, but not quite. They all link up to each other. She knows her fairytale shit, let me tell you. Because you can only mess with something effectively when you know it really well, and she takes old fairytales and reworks them in a non-stupid way. I love Emma Donoghue.

3. How I Became a Famous Novelist - I've mentioned this before. I love everything Steve Hely writes. So in this, a guy's ex-girlfriend's getting married, and in order not to look lame at her wedding, he decides to write a bestselling novel. Steve Hely makes fun of almost every popular literary genre. It's great.

4. I Know I Am, But What Are You? - Samantha Bee wrote a book and you should read it! Yes, I'm way into comedic essay collections and recommend a few of them. BUT you should know that I thusly have some kind of discernment. Would I recommend I Was Told There'd Be Cake to you all? No, I would not. Because I respect you, and that collection's just not that good. But this one's awesome.

5. Auntie Mame - It's not really underrated. Lots of people know it's great. But it's my favorite book of ever, and it should be on every list. Except for, like, Books That Suck a Lot. Because it does NOT.

6. Gaudy Night - There's a detective series from the '20s and '30s. It's called the Lord Peter Wimsey series, and it's by Dorothy L. Sayers, who was buds with C.S. Lewis and some of the other Inklings. Anyway, there's an English lord, and he solves mysteries while being witty. If that sounds AT ALL appealing, you should read the whole series, although it starts off not-so-amazing and gets really, really good by Unnatural Death. All I'm sayin' is I never read detective fiction, but I love it. And Gaudy Night is the best one, and all about Harriet Vane, Oxford-educated detective writer and love interest of Lord Peter.

7. Sideways Stories from Wayside School - This was popular when I was like 10, but I fear it's falling into obscurity. No! This must not happen! The Wayside School series is fantastic and must endure!

8. Fingersmith - If you're at all into lgbt lit, you've probably read Sarah Waters's hugely popular Tipping the Velvet. I'm tempted to put that on here, but if you're at all squeamish about ladies doin' things to other ladies, it's best to stay away from it. Fingersmith also has an lgbt slant, but it's mainly a good Victorian era novel about thieves and madhouses. And I LITERALLY dropped my jaw at least twice.

9. Invitation to a Beheading - I took a Nabokov course in college where we read eight of his books. EIGHT. I didn't even really like him; I just liked the professor. Anyway. He's okay. This book is amazing, though, because you have to put away all rational thought while reading it. No trying to figure out where the story's going, because it's completely abstract and random and insane. The semester I read it was a particularly exhausting one, and I remember staring in frustration at a page, trying to read it literally. It didn't help that I was also taking a Dickens course that semester. Whatevs, it should be read. Also Pale Fire and Pnin.

That's it. I ran out. Not foisting on you some okay book that I falsely call underrated. But the others should pretty much be read by everyone. Because they are all awesome.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Okay, people. Here it is. Where you sign up to read the entire Harry Potter series (or to reminisce fondly), starting January 2013, assuming we all survive the Mayan apocalypse. I don't think I'm even going to get to Tina and Bette's reunion on The L Word until after Christmas, so here's hopin'.

You guys know how this works. Sign up if you want to. If you're new to the blog, know that we are mostly not going to take this seriously. And when we do take it seriously, it's going to be all Monty Python quotes when we disagree on something like the other person's opinion on Draco Malfoy. So be prepared for your parents being likened to hamsters.

If you want to write lengthy, heartfelt essays, that is SWELL. But this is maybe not the readalong for you. It's gonna be more posts with this sort of thing:

We're starting Sorceror's/Philosopher's Stone January 4th. Posts will be on Fridays. The first post will be some sort of hilarious/awesome que…

Acclaimed (in England mostly) lady Caitlin Moran has a novel coming out. A NOVEL. Where before she has primarily stuck to essays. Curious as we obviously were about this, I and a group of bloggers are having a READALONG of said novel, probably rife with spoilers (maybe they don't really matter for this book, though, so you should totally still read my posts). This is all hosted/cared for/lovingly nursed to health by Emily at As the Crowe Flies (and Reads) because she has a lovely fancy job at an actual bookshop (Odyssey Books, where you can in fact pre-order this book and then feel delightful about yourself for helping an independent store). Emily and I have negotiated the wonders of Sri Lankan cuisine and wandered the Javits Center together. Would that I could drink with her more often than I have.

INTRODUCTION-wise (I might've tipped back a little something this evening, thus the constant asides), I am Alice. I enjoy the Pleistocene era of megafauna and drinking Shirley Templ…

So this article came out, which isn't really groundbreaking at all, but it happens to have been published the day after I watched part of the NOVA special "Becoming Human," so it's been on my brain anyway.

I was checking out a book a while ago called Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans, and it was all "Oh dude, our ancestors probably didn't even LOOK at Neanderthals. No way. 'Cause they would've been like, RIDICULOUSLY ugly."

That's right. Your lady ancestor, at some point, sidled up to a Neanderthal gentleman and said "Hey. How's it goin'?

Because all non-Africans ('cause the Africans stayed put instead of traipsing around becoming the Don Juans of prehistoric Europe) have 1-4% Neanderthal DNA. So the above scenario DEFINITELY happened. Which is disheartening NOT because of my huge Neanderth…